Tag: Internet

The “Daily Show” host tells the Arizona senator, “President Bush has been very clear that through his leadership, he made the world safer…. My question to you is this: How much safer can we afford to have him make us?” When McCain wouldn’t answer straight, Stewart chided him, saying, “Don’t dodge the question.”

Official diplomatic relations between the two countries may be at a nadir, but young citizens on both sides are finding common ground on Internet chat boards. Says a blogger: “We have tons of things in common. We come from two of the most liberal, educated countries in the Middle East….”

Also: Read the back story on that infamous picture of Israeli girls writing on rocket shells.

Sen. Ted Stevens’ near-incoherent speech before Congress last week about Internet fundamentals (“It’s a series of tubes”) quickly made him a national laughingstock. But his defenders say Stevens simply used imprecise language, and that he really knows his Net stuff. You decide:

Check out a glorious techno mash-up song of Sen. Ted Stevens’ instantly infamous speech last week on Internet technologies, in which the 85-year-old chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee—which is debating Net Neutrality—betrayed his woefully inadequate grasp of Net fundamentals.
(h/t: Crooks and Liars)

The practice of posting the home address of someone targeted for supposed offenses (like being a member of the ACLU), until now practiced mainly by hate groups, has been embraced by “mainstream” pundits like Michelle Malkin and David Horowitz.

As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is in charge of bills that control the future of the Internet (like Net Neutrality). So you’ll understand why we at Truthdig start crying when we read about the 85-year-old’s feeble grasp of this world-changing technology. A few Stevens quotes:

Supposed Internet experts, working off $7 million in public money, reported to the Pentagon and to Congress that terrorists are retooling American video games for use as recruitment tools. Problem is, it wasn’t the terrorists who did the retooling; it was American fans—something a 10-year-old could have discovered by using Google…(more)

The Senate is due to vote Wednesday on the Net Neutrality bill. Click here and CALL. YOUR. SENATOR.
Otherwise, when AT&T is deciding which content streams fastest to your computer, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

Two former AT&T workers have told Salon that the telecom company has maintained a secret, highly secured room in a St. Louis network operations center where, the two workers were told, employees have been “monitoring network traffic.” Salon’s security experts say the operation has all the hallmarks of an NSA operation.

This is according to Scott Redd, director of the National Counterterrorism Center. These groups of Islamic radicals are made up of disaffected men in their teens and 20s who draw moral inspiration from Al Qaeda and use the Internet to organize and plan potential attacks.

The panel recommended a version of the Net neutrality bill that would bar telecom companies from charging premium fees for Web companies that sell video and other content.This is far from a full victory, but it’s a step in that direction.

This is the big one, folks. Wired News unearths internal AT&T documents that show how the telecom company, at the behest of the government, built “secret rooms” in cities across America that enable the NSA “to look at every individual message on the Internet and analyze exactly what people are doing.”

Companies like AT&T and BellSouth are backing an organization claiming to be saving the Internet by keeping it free of “burdensome and unnecessary regulation.” But that’s nonsense. They’re the ones that want to put toll lanes on the Internet. (These are the same companies that reportedly handed over America’s phone records to the NSA.)Buzzflash sorts it out.

Pornography titan Vivid Entertainment will sell adult films through the Internet that can be burned to DVDs and watched on TVs. “Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff,” says a think-tank analyst.

In this summer’s most talked-about movie, “A Scanner Darkly,” Keanu Reeves stars as an undercover narcotics agent losing his grip on reality in an America that has lost the war on drugs. True, the film is a warning call, but might it also inadvertently channel us toward the very dystopia it is warning against?This article ran in May, but we’re trotting it out again because the movie just hit theaters this week.

If you’re disturbed by the thought of Internet service providers deciding which websites you can have access to, watch this short, entertaining and disturbing movie that crystalizes the battle now being waged over this issue in Washington and the blogosphere.

A coalition of conservatives and progressives has formed to defeat a law that would allow Internet provider companies to decide which sites load up the fastest—based on who pays them the most. Such a law would upend the even playing field that every site on the Web now enjoys. Check it out and contact your congressperson.When a right-wing blog like Instapundit and a left-wing organization like MoveOn.org get together on something, it’s worth paying attention to.

The company’s free wireless service in San Francisco would allow Google to monitor all its users’ whereabouts—ostensibly to serve up location-specific advertising.
The feeling you just got? That would be the hairs on the back on your neck rising.

Homeland Security Dept.‘s deputy press secretary allegedly tried to seduce a Florida sheriff’s detective who he thought was a 14-year-old girl.Troubling for two reasons: (a) This shows the moral fiber of the people entrusted to spy on Americans; (b) this shows the incompetence and foolishness of the people entrusted to secure our borders—this kind of sting is the oldest trick in the book.UPDATE: More details on the official’s alleged criminal actions.

A sobering report commissioned by Rumsfeld details how U.S. military planners want to take control of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, allowing America to dominate telcommunications for propaganda and psy-ops purposes.

A federal judge says he will require the search engine company to provide the government with some search-query data in connection with the Justice Dept.‘s attempts to revive an online child pornography law. It’s unclear what kind of and how much data the judge will order turned over.That strange shifting underneath your feet? It’s the slippery slope we’re all sliding down, toward an Orwellian future.
Truthdig’s Google expert Mark Malseed has the skinny on the implications of this battle.

The U.S. government pushes back at the search giant, insisting that a request to examine millions of Internet users’ search queries would not violate privacy rights. This could lead to the most fevered technology trial since the Microsoft antitrust case. Check out an excellent Truthdig essay on the issue here.

Jeff Chester at The Nation has an eye-opening report on how big telcos are trying to transform the “free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.” | story

Turning conventional wisdom on its head (see The Earth, flat; Bush, compassionate), a new study shows that Internet tools like e-mail, webcams and instant messaging actually bring people closer together. | story

Yahoo’s chief financial officer says she’d be happy just to “maintain our market share.” | storyEven though it’s been “Game Over” in the search wars for quite some time, it’s still shocking to hear the No. 2 company be so blatant about it.

The Bush administration wants to know how often porn turns up in searches. Google is fighting the subpoena. At a time when companies like Yahoo are turning over records to the Chinese government, bully for Google for standing firm. | story